Kidnapped oil worker’s health begins to fail

NIGERIAN kidnappers have said their American hostage is gravely ill and threatened to kill three other foreign oil workers held captive if he died.

A member of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, whose month-long campaign against oil installations has driven up world oil prices, said by telephone that the health of oil worker Patrick Landry was failing.

“One of them is sick, badly sick and could give up tonight,” said the man, who identified himself as the ground commander of the movement.

“If one of them dies, we kill them all.”

The hostages - including a Briton, a Honduran and a Bulgarian - complained by telephone of diarrhoea and fatigue from constant movement in the humid, mosquito-plagued creeks of Nigeria’s southern delta.

The workers appealed to their governments to press Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to meet the militants’ demands for the release of ethnic Ijaw leaders and for local control over the region’s oil wealth.

The Ijaw militant group said it has not received any contact from Nigeria’s government and would not accept a ransom for the hostages, abducted from an offshore oilfield operated by Royal Dutch Shell.

Mr Landry said by phone: “We are in bad shape here, we really are. Meet these people’s demands. We are not military: we came here to work.”

The militants are also demanding Shell pay $1.5 billion (€1.23bn) to Bayelsa state to compensate for pollution. Shell has cut its production by 210,000 barrels a day - a 10th of Nigeria’s output.

They have already bombed two export pipelines and attacked at least two large oil platforms. Dozens have been killed, including about 12 soldiers.

In an email Thursday, the group said: “To demonstrate our disregard for the Nigerian military presence in the Niger Delta, we will carry out a series of very significant attacks shortly.”

The group said two jailed Ijaw leaders, militant Mujahid Dokubo-Asari and former Bayelsa state governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, were the only qualified mediators for talks with the government.

Mr Alamieyeseigha was impeached last month for money-laundering and now faces criminal charges. Mr Asari, who led a bloody rebellion in the delta in 2004, is on trial for treason.

The kidnappers had earlier said they would not harm the hostages and had offered to free Mr Landry, who suffers from high blood pressure, if his firm’s managing director took his place. He works for US-based oil service firm Tidex.

Some analysts believe the violence could be intended to reinforce the delta’s claim over the choice of the ruling party candidate for presidential elections next year.

An Ijaw uprising before 2003 elections curbed 40% of Nigerian output.

So far, Shell is the only oil major to admit it has suffered at the hands of the Ijaw militants.